Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/79

Rh When he died in the year following, some thirty-five thousand people are said to have passed his body as it lay in state under the dome of the Indiana capitol. The impression that Riley made—and still makes—on the American public was indeed extraordinary.

It is to be accounted for, in part, by his personality. His sunny, gentle nature won the affection of those who met him, and he had a group of loyal friends who presented him to the public in his true character. But in the main his popularity depends on the excellence and the limits of his achievement. Essentially sincere, he nevertheless aimed at the public a little too deliberately. "In my readings," he informs us, "I had an opportunity to study and find out for myself what the public wants, and afterwards I would endeavour to use the knowledge gained in my writing." The public wants, he concluded, "simple sentiments that come from the heart" and not intellectual excellence; he must therefore compose poems, he says expressively, "simply heart high."

This he did. Even his poems in conventional English, of which he wrote not a few, fail to rise above simple sentiments; there is scarcely a trace of thought or passion in even so pleasantly sentimental a poem as An Old Sweetheart of Mine. Nor, in all his dialect verse, is there more than a suggestion here and there of the profundity of emotion—not to mention profundity of thought—of the great poets. He wrote of the everyday life of rustic America, of "home" and "old times,"—magic words with him,—of childhood, of simple well-tried pleasures and sensibly received pains. He had genuine sympathy for ordinary folk, for animals, for nature. In his presentation of character,—Old John Clevenger, Bee Fessler, Myle Jones's wife, and the rest of his large gallery, — he showed an understanding born of sympathy and humour; in his pictures of nature, as in When the Frost is on the Punkin, responsiveness and distinct vision, though to be sure he fails to go much below the physical, even the air being "so appetizin" merely. His "philosophy" is that of the prudent farmer; it is made up of the most patent truisms, though some of them are freshly worded. If there is nowhere the quality of The Biglow Papers, still less of Burns, there is at least a wholesomeness of mood and mind, uncommon in the restlessly brooding nineteenth century, that offers some